Sarah Koenig

But still, you can chalk them up to Jay trying to protect his friends.

Or trying to protect himself.

In the first taped interview, Jay says they're grabbing some food at a restaurant when Officer Adcock calls Adnan asking if he's seen Hay.

The next time he tells it, he says that when that call comes, they're at a friend's apartment, a friend whose father happens to be a homicide detective in another county.

Jay tells the cops he'd actually been to her house three different times that day, but he didn't want to get her in trouble.

In the first taped statement, Jay says he refused to help dig a grave for Hay.

Two weeks later, he says they both dug the hole.

But then there are other changes, bigger changes, where it's harder to judge why the details shift.

This one, for instance.

In the first taped interview, Jay says Anand only told him that same day that he was going to kill Hay.

Two weeks later, Jay says that Anand had started talking about it beforehand, four or five days before.

And, he says, Adnan enlisted his help with the murder on the 12th, the night before Hay disappeared.

In this version, Jay tells Jen about it in advance, too.

But by the time Jay testifies at trial, he goes back to the first version again, that he knew nothing until the day of, and that he didn't really take it seriously.

There's so many more of these.

There's a whole side trip Adnan and Jay supposedly take that afternoon after Hay's been killed to smoke some weed in Patapsco State Park.

That trip disappears by trial, just drops out of the narrative.

And Jay's whereabouts in between the time he drops Adnan back at school at midday and when he meets back up with him later that afternoon, the stories about where he is are so messy and so confusing that I can't even keep the different versions straight.

But none of these discrepancies gives me, or I think the cops, as much pause as this next one.

This is the mother of what the cops call Jay's inconsistencies.